The I Ching (Book of Changes): A Critical Translation of the Ancient Text

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1 Bernard Karlgren, “The Book of Documents,” Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 22 (1950): 1.

2 Richard Wilhelm, The I Ching; or, Book of Changes, trans. Cary F. Baynes (New York: Pantheon Books, 1950). This edition contains a preface by Carl Jung.

3 These two dissertations study the core textual layers of the transmitted, Wang Bi version of the text. See Richard Alan Kunst, “The Original Yijing: A Text, Phonetic Transcription, Translation, and Indexes, with Sample Glosses” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1987); and also Edward L. Shaughnessy, “The Composition of the Zhouyi” (Ph.D. diss. Stanford University, 1983). Shaughnessy has studied and translated excavated manuscripts bearing variant versions of the Yijing text, including the silk manuscript excavated at Mawangdui in 1973 and several subsequently unearthed bamboo manuscripts: Edward L. Shaughnessy, I Ching: The Classic of Changes (New York: Ballantine Books, 1997); and Edward L. Shaughnessy, Unearthing the Changes: Recently Discovered Manuscripts of the Yi Jing (I Ching) and Related Texts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). Redmond exhibits familiarity with Shaughnessy’s Yijing studies, but they are absent from the bibliography.

4 Rutt’s translation, with the same focus on the early layers of the text, is aptly entitled Zhouyi, even though unlike the translation under review, it also includes a separate translation of the “ten wing” commentaries. See Richard Rutt, The Book of Changes (Zhouyi): A Bronze Age Document (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 1996).

5 For one example of a contrasting approach also focused on the divinatory aspect of the Yijing, see John Blofeld, The Book of Change, 2nd ed. (London: Allen & Unwin, 1968). Blofeld argues that any failing of Yijing divination to produce accurate results is a failing of the interpreter and not of the book.

6 Lynn’s excellent study translates not only the text of the Yijing, as read by Wang Bi, but also Wang’s commentarial writings. See Richard John Lynn, The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). The text transmitted along with Wang Bi’s commentary became the standard in later imperial times.

7 James Legge, The Sacred Books of China: The Texts of Confucianism, vol. XVI (The Yî king) (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1899) (also omitted from Redmond’s bibliography). Redmond finds Wilhelm’s work to be founded in scholarly competence, but views the Baynes translation primarily as a literary adaptation.

8 Richard J. Smith, Fathoming the Cosmos and Ordering the World: The Yijing (I Ching, or Classic of Changes) and Its Evolution in China (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008); Richard J. Smith, The I Ching: A Biography (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012).